Not A Wake:
A Dream Embodying
π's
Digits Fully For 10000 Decimals by Mike Keith,
illustrated by Diana Keith

Not A Wake is
the first book ever written completely in Pilish,
that peculiar dialect of English in which the
numbers of letters in successive words follow the digits of the number π
(3.14159265358979323846...).
Divided into ten sections of 1000 digits, each written in a different style,
its words "spell out" the first 10,000 digits of the number.

Take a look at the
first two lines of the book, the opening of the free-verse poem in section
one:

As you can see from the
red numbers, the lengths of the words faithfully
follow the digits of π.
This continues in an unbroken stream to the end of the book, encompassing
10,000 digits in all (the last of which is a "7").

Not A Wake is an
example of
constrained writing, a literary technique in which a text is required to
follow some sort of algorithmic rule, usually lexical in nature (related to
the letters and words of the text). Well-known books of this kind
include

- Georges Perec's La
Disparition, which does not contain the letter E.
- Christian Bök's Eunoia, in which each of the five main sections is a
univocalic in one of
the five vowels.
- Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa, in which the initial letters of
words are constrained in a certain way.

in addition to the
works of the literary group
Oulipo, who write exclusively with constraints. As do all the
works just listed, Not A Wake reveals (and revels in) the paradoxical nature
of the constraint. On the one hand it is a difficult taskmaster,
limiting (sometimes severely) what can be written or expressed. On the
other hand it is liberating, often suggesting new ideas or ways of
expressing things that would otherwise not occur to the writer.
Sometimes we "go with the flow" of the constraint, resulting in surreal
images such as

As an evening
dissolves, undead humanity
Commences to float westward, televised to the world

from the poem in
section one, or

Contributing green
light, I picture Spring,
which looked through death:
a dog lying quietly under a strange tribunal.

from section five.
Other times we attempt to tame the constraint, reaching for (though only
occasionally attaining) a state of naturalness that hopes to deny the
presence of the constraint. Such as in the opening paragraph of the
third story in section eight:

I
abandoned all religious practices when Frederick Fourteenth
climbed to the throne, as the anti-church king mostly rejected them.
Many spiritually thirsty men continued with sacraments, but my
fervor lived elsewhere.

The styles employed in
the ten sections of the book are:

1 A
free-verse poem.
2 Five short stories.
3 97 haiku on a wide variety of subjects.
4 Two intertwined poems which blend together as their
narrators meet.
5 A surrealist poem in 14 stanzas.
6 A movie screenplay.
7 A dream about puzzles, containing two newspaper-quality
crosswords with Pilish clues.
8 Three short stories.
9 Three poems and a stage play, each with an illustration
that encodes some digits as well.
10 Ah, this one's a surprise!

Not A Wake can
be purchased from Amazon.com by going
here.
It is available as both a paperback (at a list price of [π2
+ π/2]
dollars, though Amazon usually offers it at a reduced price) and as an ebook
for the Kindle platforms (Kindle reader, Kindle for PC and Mac, and Kindle
for iPad) for a mere π
dollars. If you would like an autographed copy of the paperback,
email me.